Tuesday, May 10, 2011

"No word for adultery"

In the current (May 16) New Yorker, a review of Sarah Vowell's "Unfamiliar Fishes" describes early missionaries to Hawaii as

... wan New Englanders confronted with a people whose language lacked a word for adultery. (Their approximation: "Mischievous mating.")

The "no word for adultery" is Vowell's conceit, apparently, and I haven't tried to check its accuracy. But what immediately struck me is that "mischievous mating" is about a million times more descriptive than "adultery." How did a word like that come to mean "illicit sex with a married person?"

Wikipedia says there is also "philandery", a word I've always associated with run-around males, but might be assigned to run-around mates in general.Unfortunately, Wikipedia also says some amazingly dumb things, including "adultery is voluntary, while rape is not"! Um, the rapist is acting involuntarily, eh? I don't THINK so.Now, do we believe Wiki when it comes to etymology? Hmm. It says adultery comes from the Latin "adulterat" which means "to pollute" — I like that — but it refers to women who commit adultery, not to men.So, there are two words, then? "Philandering" for a male adulterer and "polluting " for a female?I think "mischievous mating" is a better term than adultery anyway. Good for the Hawaiians!— K

Same as adulterate; adultery is corruption of the marriage relationship by introducing an ingredient seen by the other spouse as improper and undesirable. No connection to adult; the former's Latin root is alterare 'alter', the latter's is alere 'nourish'.

@T. Roger: Indeed! But the beauty of the blog is that other people will look it up even faster than I could!@ Ø -- I was interested in the historical senses of "mischief" too, so I looked that up after "adultery," and it has had the wink-wink sense ("childish naughtiness") since 1675 and the "charmingly roguish" one since 1761. I know I try to calibrate my sense of the gravity of "mischief" according to the source, but it's been ambiguous -- or versatile, at least -- for quite a while.

About the author

Jan Freeman wrote The Word, a weekly Boston Globe column, for 14 years, retiring from it in August 2011. She was also an editor at the Globe from 1981 to 2001. Her 2009 book, "Ambrose Bierce's 'Write It Right': The Celebrated Cynic's Language Peeves Deciphered, Appraised, and Annotated for 21st-Century Readers" (Walker Books), is a centenary edition (and attempted explanation) of the peeve collection Bierce published in 1909 with the subtitle "A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults."